Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday July 13, 2011 @09:43AM
from the so-much-irony dept.

ianpm writes "Mark Zuckerberg has decided to leave Google's new social network because he 'doesn't want to be tracked.' In other news, the Internet's irony meter has just exploded. Robert Scoble is now the most followed person on Google+ according to The Inquirer." Most of the article is about the rankings of various G+ users with big followings. I currently have a measly 400 or so. Guess I'll never be as cool as MySpace's Tom.

Or that Slashdot slams any other website for putting up titles that are absolute lies just just to get clicks...I mean this is really disgusting and Slashdot should be absolutely ashamed!FTFA"The changes were revealed on the Google+ account belonging to the Social Statistics compiler Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten. He explained that some Google+ members could no longer be tracked as they had further closed off their accounts on Tuesday. Interesting that Zuckerberg, the man so happy to gather and share so much of everyone else's data on Facebook, is suddenly so protective over his own."

You have lies, damn lies, statistics and then Slashdot headlines.Really guys that is so sad.

If you want to be anonymous use a fictitious name. OK I am sure governments and police could track you but for 99.999% of users this is sufficient. The others should look at going via tor [wikipedia.org].

The article (I know, I must leave now) does NOT say he quit G+. It says that he along with the top Mgmt at Google all seem to have opted for tighter privacy controls overnight. The number of friends and followers can no longer be *tracked*.

Not that its an excuse, but 'everything is open from day 0' is how Facebook was until maybe a year ago. So its still ironic:) You'd have thought Google would have learned that little lesson though from just watching the complaints against how Facebook handled privacy. Also, I thought the whole point of Google+ was that they learned not to make everything public, like they did with Buzz. I guess not.

Umm I fail to see the logic in the statements. I opened a Google account yesterday, I shared a picture, it asked me, which circles do you want to share this with, pretty certain on Facebook were I to upload that same picture it would automatically assume everyone on my friends list is free game unless I went much deeper into the settings and tweaked things.

So Mr. Suckerberg the shoe on that other foot does not feel so good, does it?
I can understand not wanting to be tracked but Mr. Suckerberg you'll have to explain to me why then I should join Facebook. Especially in its early days when you said people were fucking idiots for trusting you with their data.

I know a handful of 'oh hell no I'm not doing facebook' people (I'm one of them). They want meticulous control over how they communicate and with whom they communicate, and that flies in the face of the whole point of facebook. I understand this. I understand you can be meticulous and all that with facebook in theory, but then I see no benefit to using Facebook at all over other forms of communication, so why bother.

What I don't get is why about half of the people I know who have consistently said this about facebook have started pestering me to join Google+. How the hell does Google get people to make an about face like that?

As someone who has avoided Facebook and is trying out Google+, part of it is trust.

I don't trust Facebook to honor what I tell them in my controls; I think they will neither provide adequate technical protections, or believe they will act in good faith whenever they can make a buck. I also don't like their lock-in.

I think Google will do a better job on these fronts. The non-lock-in approach is an excellent show of good faith. I've used other Google products, and with the exception of some honest mistakes wi

All this competition for coolness before it even becomes possible for most of us to compete. ("the rankings of various G+ users with big followings. I currently have a measly 400 or so.") So by the time it comes available to us, sans-culottes, why should we bother?...sort've reminds one of Bitcoin in a way really.

Ironic, as I'm leaving Facebook for privacy concerns and moving to Google+. With Facebook, I never quite know what is going to be publicly revealed and displayed—intentionally or not. Google+ is taking aims to ensure it is easy to control who sees what when I post something. With Facebook, it's always been a crapshoot as to what may be considered private one week and public the next.

Before anyone really gets up in a tizzy about privacy, the point behind these two services is to broadcast to a given collection of people—the world, friends, or family—the activities in which you are participating. With G+, I can fine tune who sees what.

I will say that the Google+ interface isn't quite as matured as Facebook's. But they've done a good job for right out of the gate! I also believe that once G+ gets more people, we will better be able to judge how well it works.

You are wrong about this. The way that google has decided to unroll this product accomplishes many things. To begin with, it creates hype, and the invitation tree premaps social networks. When you join by invitation, you already have at least one connection seeded, and its not some buster named Tom. Clever, eh?

Ditto, regardless of how imperfect it is in the beginning, I believe that Google will do a much better job managing privacy in the long run and will not change privacy settings every week, opting in all users by default and waiting for them to maybe find out about the issues on their own and change their settings to adapt. I dropped Facebook a couple of years ago and haven't looked back once - if Google+ can replace it, great, if it can't - I will stick with LinkedIn and more immediate means of communicatio

But apparently on by default or something. I don't know my wife posted her first picture on it and it had a link underneath with our exact address on Google maps. She didn't enable it she just took a picture with the Google+ Android app.

Well, the first is just Google data mining your info to provide better ads. Since this information is only being used by Google, its still private, in the sense that its not publicly available (note that the same will be true of EVERY social networking site by definition: whoever you give information to will have that info. No way to stop that. Google is just being honest and telling you that that info will be used BY THEMy them to provide targeted ads. NOT shared with third parties: only the ads they targe

Facebook, on the other hand, has privacy controls deeply buried, which often reset themselves, and up to very recently at least (don't use Facebook apps anymore) didn't work properly with Facebook apps. I'll go with G+, TYVM.

This "feature" drives me nuts. More than once, out of the blue, facebook will start emailing me when someone replies to my status or sends me a friend request, even though I've disable that several times. I then have to go through every god damn setting to make sure they haven't randomly changed something else, like "show my posts to the whole fucking world" despite me setting them to "Friends only" very much on purpose.

I've had to remove every damn bit of information on myself possible just on the off chance that they screw up again, I don't my "dox" public. Facebook no longer has any idea where I live, have lived, what high school I went to, what college I went to, hell I'm not even sure it knows what year I was born. I had to get rid of all of that a long time ago (although in retrospect, I'm think I would have anyway and am glad I did). Anybody who wants to find me on the network better already know somebody else who is a friend of mine.

As for apps, I years ago uninstalled all the stupid "what transformer are you?" bullshit and haven't installed a single app since I found out just what the hell they had access to. Frightening.

1) Facebook also does this with the facebook ads network (on about 1/3 sites on the net). You can prevent this by disabling "instant personalization"2) This is an option during signup unchecked by default (at least when I signed up). You opt in, a word Facebook would do well to learn.3) Facebook makes profiles searchable on search engines by default as well. You can disable this.

So...it has the same privacy violations as facebook...not seeing your point.

Exactly, at least that's the biggest draw for me. I don't want every one of my contacts to see my detailed account of the dead hooker in my trunk. There are things that may be relevant and appropriate to say to friends that you wouldn't want your family or colleagues to see. My RL friends don't know or care about my online friends and vice versa, and none of my friends don't care about my grandma's 80th birthday or the company picnic.

On Google+, he set his profile public, and they can all see him, and he can't see all the stuff they set private like he can on Facebook.

See? Privacy... Concern...

Unless Mark can be private while at the same time looking into everyone else's dirty little secrets (I wonder exactly how many private nude pictures he's check out late nights at FB...), then it's a concern for him, a... privacy... concern...

Besides, this is a publicity stunt. He is trying to throw privacy concerns Google's way to make them look just as bad as him. Of course, it could be the biggest FAIL of the year. It'd be like McDonald's calling out Wendy's on obesity concerns.

This was my reaction too (steepled fingers, "well played, Mr. Zuckerberg. Well played."). A bit of G+ chatter / press went to Zuckerberg being the most followed on G+. He gets some attention. Then throws his hands up and goes "never-mind how I said that the age of privacy is over... G+ is too scary!"

Facebook may have controls over your privacy, but they aren't very well documented. I know someone who hates FB who activated an account just to check out an event that was not available unless logged in. They set their account up and tried to make the privacy controls as strict as possible.

After being logged in once, they started noticing that sites with facebook sidebars were starting to show images from other fourms that he'd browsed. Apparently, just closing a browser tab doesn't sever the connection wi

On FB I sometimes see friends 'Like' things that seem surprising for them... I think some sites have figured out how to make you 'like' things without clicking on the 'like' button/link as long as your browser has you logged in to facebook.

It doesn't work that way. Have you ever noticed that a huge amount of websites have that little icon about "like this page on facebook" or whatever? Many sites also allow you to log in using your facebook account as a sort of single-sign on. Anyways, any site you go to that has the Facebook icon? Facebook can see the referrer for the icon image and therefore knows the URL for the site you went to. It's the same for Twitter and all the other similar type things where you see their little icon littered t

I think the setting your friend is looking for is here:Accounts... Privacy Settings.Click on "edit your settings" in the "Apps and Websites" blurb below the left column - yes they've somewhat disguised this so it appears more like an ad or something otherwise ignorable even though it's some of the most important privacy settings in the system.I strongly recommend turning off all platform apps, games and websites.You'll know it's working if those websites with facebook sidebars show a blurb that you have dis

Facebook and Google+ both have the same set of features and allows the same level of tracking (more or less). They are "SOCIAL" networks. that is their purpose. They enable you to socially connect with people, websites and so on, and they do it for "free". All you have to do is agree to be tracked. Don't like it, don't use it. Sit alone in your mom's basement and decry your lack of privacy on the net.

Marketing genius? The better move would have been to wait till the very day that Google headlines with "G+ out of Beta. Available to the Masses". Then when Zuck quits it makes the same side-by-side headlines with Google's press release. Would have been much more effective. Zuck blew his load too soon.

That was the WTF part of this, Zuckerberg the douche that regularly changes the privacy policy to catch people off guard is complaining about Google+'s privacy policy? Seriously, Google doesn't randomly change the privacy policy to find people that missed the memo so that they can release the information without consent.

I have a question for you or anyone out there that can answer it. I accidentally failed to uncheck that, "I can be tracked," box when I signed up (it was late, I was sleep deprived and in a rush). Does anyone know where the option to turn this tracking thingy off is after after you sign up?

Yeah, except FB routinely changes the way things are made private/public, and defaults those settings to 'Wide Open'. They then notify you up to 48 hours later, giving the search crawlers plenty of time to index your stuff.

At least with Facebook I have control over what my information is made public.

Do you really believe this? You think the company which came up with Beacon and introduced it as on by default has any interest in giving you control over your information? Much as I don't hate Zuckerberg, he and facebook are playing you for a sucker.

You CAN change what information is public and what you want to give out.

If you trust Facebook to live up to their promises in this regard (which are pretty flimsy to start with) I have a bridge to sell you. I leave you with a verified quote from Zuckerberg about his users:

At least with Facebook I have control over what my information is made public.

The only things on G+ that are made public without a choice is your name, gender, and a picture of your choosing. If you're worried about that information being more than what you'd like to share with the general public, you've got bigger issues and probably shouldn't be on a social networking site in the first place. To chalk those peices of info up to "zomg, they're giving away our private info to anyone!" is just fear-mongering. Please stop and stay on your lawn.

and Facebook doesn't allow Google to index that private information

Legitimate concern, I suppose.

When you sign up to Google+, see these very information:
- Google can use your information to prodive targeted marketing across Google sites and every affiliated site (ie. millions of sites where AdWords is installed)
- Show photo geo location information in newly uploaded albums and photos.
- Show this profile publicly (enabled by default)

This was obviously a stunt from the get-go. Zuckerberg joined only with the intention of quitting in mock disgust later, in a stunt to protect his media empire, which is all based around collecting and selling personal information.

As to photo geolocation - if it doesn't exist in the first place it won't show it. Don't geotag photos you want the locations of to be private.

I'm glad that finally a social network supports geolocation, there are lots of times when I WANT people to know where a photo was taken. I make a point of not geotagging anything that I don't want the location of to be known.

The only things required to be public are your first and last name, gender and profile photos. That's it. I imagine that's about the basic to confirm you know someone.

Guess what? Facebook does this too, except for private profiles, which you can't even find anyway, and thus as google says "we intend for you to be able to find your friends" isn't going to happen with private profiles, is it?

The reality is that the only people the profiles are private to is the users,

You can still limit what profile info gets seen by which "circles". The "private" profile is nothing more than a circle of just you and only ever you. If you have profile information that neither friends or family should see, don't add it. To put it simply, at least one circle must be able to see profile information that you add, if you don't want ANYONE to ever see it, don't add it.

3. And the public profile has what information ? your name and gender - as if it's not already publicly available?

GP might have difficulty determining the latter.

In G+ the gender is going to become available to be private if you wish, like everything in your g+ profile other than ones name. It very plainly says this when you are editing your profile. I find this much easier to configure than the multi-page fun of privacy settings that is facebook.

I find this much easier to configure than the multi-page fun of privacy settings that is facebook.

The most fun privacy setting to find is the little check-box, hidden away from almost all other privacy settings, stating: My friends' apps can access any of my data, regardless of whether I use the app myself

(That's a paraphrase. I'm at work and don't want to log into my soon-to-be-deleted facebook account now.)

At work at least, I updated my hosts file to redirect anything related to facebook domains to a dummy IP. This prevents the facebook widgets and placement devices from functioning at least from any PC other than my home one.

We'll see if they take the facebook route of introducing things like "We'll use your picture in Starbucks ads" or "We'll use facial recognition to tag you in other people's photos" and opt you IN by default, requiring you to navigate an incomprehensible maze of ever-changing privacy options in order to opt out when new features - which you are never notified of - threaten your privacy in new ways.

We're all making jokes about it, because it is completely absurd. Zuckerberg is the guy who kept on telling people that there is no privacy anymore and that anyone who wants privacy must be up to no good.

Well it's pretty obvious that social networking is for ego stroking and gratification. I mean how else are you going to blow your e-load all over the place. Can't you hear those electrons buzzing in excitement now?